Sunday, June 30, 2013

Staunton, June 30 – The harsh
authoritarian regime of Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov has
erected a façade of stability and well-being that conceals the extent to which
his policies have created “favorable conditions” for the appearance of radical
Islamist groups, according to a former Ashgabat security officer.

The anonymous officer’s comments to
a Russian news agency come following two Russian television reports about the
capture of militants from Turkmenistan fighting in Syria, the denial of those
reports by Turkmenistan’s foreign ministry, and a Youtube video that appears to
confirm the Russian coverage.

A week ago, two Russian television
channels, Rossiya-1 and Rossiya-24, reported that several citizens of
Turkmenistan had been fighting alongside Al-Qaeda forces in Syria, reports that
the Turkmenistan foreign ministry promptly denied and said threatened to harm
good relations between Moscow and Ashgabat (regnum.ru/news/polit/1677935.html).

That might have been the end of this
story had it not been for the subsequent appearance of a Youtube video showing
an interview with one of the fighters in Syria who identified himself as the
leader of a group of militants from Turkmenistan and said they wanted to
establish an Islamist state in their homeland (youtube.com/watch?v=Y1Z629KG4aA&feature=youtu.be).

The Regnum.ru agency said “in the
opinion of experts,” this exchange highlights “not only the low level of
professionalism of employees of the Turkmen ministry of foreign affairs but
also the complete absence of such professionalism” in that country’s ministry
of national security.”

According to the Russian agency, despite
that ministry’s oppression of “civic activists, independent journalists and representatives
of religious minorities,” Turkmenistan’s main national security agency “has
turned out to be hopeless regarding those who are creating a real threat to the
security of the country.”

Ashgabat’s superficial control of
the country’s official mosques, which “begin and end” their services not with verses
from the Koran but citations from the works of the country’s president, has,
the anonymous former Turkmenistan security officer said, has “created a milieu
in which the representatives of true Islam are appearing.”

Moreover, Regnum.ru continues, Ashgabat
often has appeared oblivious to the impact of efforts by radical Islamists from
Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, although it did close the Turkmen-Turkish
schools two years ago, albeit “after the train had already left the station”
and “thousands of young people” had been recruited by the radicals.

That may be changing. Regnum.ru reports that
“at the last closed session of the Security Council [of Turkmenistan], the head
of the Ministry of National Security received directives from Supreme Commander
Berdymuhamedov to identify and hold responsible all advocates of true Islam and
by their actions bringing shame on the nation in the eyes of the world.”

Moreover, the Russian news agency
says “there is also unofficial information concerning the creation of a special
group” within that ministry to investigate the contacts of those who went to
Turkey and did not return home” after the time set by their visas. “Another
special group,” it says, “has begun following and analyzing commentaries
appearing on the pages of religious Internet sites.”

Staunton, June 30 – Over the last
decade, Russian nationalist activists and officials have sought to boost the
Kryashens, a small community consisting of Russian Orthodox Tatars, as a
distinct nation in order to reduce the size and influence of the Kazan Tatars
who view the Kryashens -- whose name means “the baptized ones” -- as a
Christian subgroup of their nation.

But there is growing evidence that
this effort is petering out – the Kryashen.ru website has ceased to be updated
and the Russian Orthodox site, rusk.ru, which chronicled Moscow’s efforts in
this regard (See, inter alia, rusk.ru/st.php?idar=8540),
has dramatically reduced the number of posts about them.

One reason for this decline is that
there won’t be another census in the Russian Federation until at least 2020,
and in the enumeration in 2010 only 34,882 people declared themselves to be
Kryashens, far fewer than many in Moscow had expected and a figure that is
microscopically small compared to the 5.5 million who declared themselves to be
Tatars.

A second reason, however, involves
the underlying weakness of the argument that the Kryashens are a self-standing
ethnic community, a claim made by many Kryashens and their Muscovite supporters
but one undercut by the reject decisions of people who had identified as
Kryashens to convert to Islam and declare themselves to be Tatars.

The most prominent of those is Ivan
Yegorov, who had been head of the Kryashen organization in Tatarstan and leader
of the Ak Bars holding company.In
October 2012, he was elected to the executive committee of the World Congress
of Tatars, something that would have been impossible had he insisted on his
Kryashenness.

But a new case of conversion to
Islam and to the Tatars is stirring up even more controversy among the
Kryashens and those in the Moscow media world who present themselves as the
defenders of that group.It involves
Aleksandr Dolgov, the former Kryashen activist and current Tatar analyst and
blogger.

According to the Regnum.ru news
agency on Friday, the Kryashens are outraged by the revelation that “Dolgov
while serving as president of [the Forum of Kryashen Youth] secretly accepted
Islam and began to consider himself a Tatar (regnum.ru/news/fd-volga/tatarstan/1676952.html).

Regnum.ru says that such anger is
justified because in its words “the Kryashens are a unique Turkic ethnos, the
culture and traditions of which are indivisibly connected with Orthodox which
helped it over the course of many centuries to preserve its national identity,”
despite Tatar efforts to treat them only as Orthodox Tatars.

“In the post-Soviet period,” the
Russian news agency continues, “the ethnocratic regime” in Kazan has devoted
particular efforts to making the Kryashens into something they are not, “’a
constituent part of the Tatar people,’ which always have generated among
Kryashen society protests.”

In support of that contention, which
many Tatars would reject not only because Moscow did not support the Kryashen
identity until the last 15 years but also because most Tatars themselves have
been comfortable with the idea that one could be both Tatar and Orthodox,
Regnum.ru offers statements from various Kryashen activists about Dolgov’s
perfidy.

But what really appears to be behind
the Regnum.ru attack is an article by Dolgov himself, entitled “The Mission of
the Tatars in the Islamic World of Russia is Great,” that appeared earlier last
week on the Islam-Today.ru portal and that advanced arguments the Russian site
found highly offensive (islam-today.ru/article/10986).

In it, Dolgov says that “the Tatars
are the largest people of ‘ethnic Muslims’ in Russia” but that “in recent
times, there has been a tendency to artificially divide the Tatars and the
Muslim umma” of that country, despite the fact that until 1917 the terms “Tatar”
and “Muslim” were synonyms in Russia.

Dolgov, now the editor of www.tatartime.com and a regular commentator
for www.info-islam.ru, argues that it is
time “to give a new contemporary meaning to the words ‘Tatar-Muslim’” and to
stress that “the Tatar world consists of those places where Tatars live … not only
in Tatarstan, Bashkortostan and Russia” but across the entire world.

“The Tatars,” he continues, “were
always a state forming people,” but “by the will of Allah and for objective reasons
they have remained without their own state.” Now, they have the most favorable
time ever to promote their national interests, and consequently, the Tatars
must make sure that they clearly define those.

A major task, he says, is to block
the spread of radical Islamist ideas, which penetrated Tatarstan because of the
Bolsheviks’ destruction of the pre-1917 Tatar intelligentsia and the fact that “young
people there over the course of 70 years were cut off from their historical
roots and fromt this Tatar Islamic theological heritage.”

To overcome that, Dolgov adds, Tatars
must work to ensure that younger members of their community will “operate on
their own national-historical basis and religion.” They must understand that
only Tatars can do this because no one else will succeed. And they need to
ensure that the jadidist tradition is again at the center of Muslim education
in Tatarstan.

Saturday, June 29, 2013

Staunton, June 29 – Only 45 percent
of the citizens of the Russian Federation currently view themselves as members
of a civic Russian nation, a poll finding that has forced Moscow to reduce its
hopes that it will be able to convince 86 percent of the country’s residents to
identify in that way by 2018. Now, officials say, they hope to raise the number
to 64 percent.

Polubota suggests that among the
most important reasons for Moscow’s lowering of its sights on this issue are
resistance among ethnic Russians to a step they see as a denigration of their
status, Moscow’s inability to find enough money to promote this identity, and
the weakness of the state itself which means that fewer RF citizens are
interested in identifying with it.

The “Svobodnaya pressa”
analyst spoke with three experts about these issues, Pavel Salin, the director
of the Moscow Center for Political Research of the Finance University, Egor
Kholmogorov, a Russian nationalist who serves as the editor in chief of the “Russky Obozrevatel” online journal, and Iosef
Diskin, co-chairman of the Council on National Strategy.

Salin
said that Moscow in the early 1990s had set itself what was “in principle a
realistic task” of getting people to identify as civic rather than ethnic
Russians. After all, that is what the leader of the USSR had done and done with
a great deal of success in promoting a Soviet identity until the time of the
Soviet collapse.

Even
now, older people continue to share in that identity, he continued, with people
over 50 tending to be far more internationalist than younger groups, a division
that “is characteristic not only for Russia but also for the other post-Soviet
states.” Given that base, it was not unreasonable for the Russian government to
think it could do the same.

But
the post-Soviet Russian government has not been able to do so and “for one
simple reason,” Salin argued. “The base for a single civic nation always is a
powerful state,” and that means a state and “not a personalist power” which is
what the Russian Federation has had over the last two decades.“In
the USSR, state institutions as a whole worked, and people felt on their own
skins the power of the state which one way or another defends them. But in the post-Soviet
years, the state constantly has suffered from erosion and is falling apart. Its
institutions are being replaced by sub-institutions like corruption and clans
ethnic and otherwise.”

“The state as
such has been very much weakened,” Salin said, adding that “in such
circumstances it is impossible to support a former identity let alone create a
new one.”

“In the USSR, the process of forming
a new identity went in parallel with the process of forming a powerful state.
But the contemporary Russian authorities, despite all their declarations have
not put the creation of a strong state as their task in principle.” They are
quite willing to live with a personalist one, something few beyond their ranks
can identify with.

RF citizens are thus disappointed,
and consequently they are seeking other things to identify with, including
their families and ethnic nations. That is particularly the case among ethnic
Russians living in cities where the atomization of society is the greatest, but
it is found elsewhere as well.

Many members of other nationalities
are prepared to identify as civic Russians because “they have greater benefits
from the existing situation in the country and therefore with greater
willingness identify themselves with Russia as a whole.” When abroad, Salin
continued, they even identify themselves as civic Russians.

But among urbanized groups of these
ethnic communities such as the Tatars, “there is a growing feeling of injustice”
and consequently they too are turning to their own ethno-national
identifications.For all these reasons,
the Moscow analyst said, “only a small part of the population wants to feel
itself as a representative of a political Russian nation.”

For his part, Kholmogorov argued
that the ministry poll overstates the number of people in the RF who identify
as civic Russians.That is an artificial
construct, he said, one that was
pushed by Boris Yeltsin precisely as an alternative to the ethnic one and thus
viewed by ethnic Russians as an attack on their prerogatives as the majority
nation in the country.

But Diskin drew a rather different
conclusion.According to him, there is “a
clear tendency” for RF citizens to shift from an ethnic to a political
identity, although he conceded that this would take time as does any identity
shift.

“At the beginning of the 1990s,” he
pointed out “the majority of citizens of Russia considered themselves to be
Soviet people but since then the formation of a civic Russian nation has
gone forward.This process will
continue.” And he suggested that “ethnicity today is not the chief form of
self-identification” for many.

As evidence of
that, he noted that “people
may say that ‘I am a Russian’ or ‘I am an Avar’ but at football matches they
will sing together the hymn of the Russian Federation” and more generally, most
of them will not see any conflict between those two levels of identity even if “a
small part of society” does.

Staunton, June 29 – Moscow’s
decision to sell arms to Azerbaijan while continuing to be the main weapons
supplier to Armenia has attracted widespread attention given the potential for
a renewal of fighting between those two countries, but now the Russian
government is selling arms to two countries in Central Asia that also are
involved in a serious conflict.

This past week, Russian Defense
Minister Sergey Shoygu announced that Moscow intends to begin supplying arms to
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.Kyrgyzstan
will get 1.1 billion USD in arms, while Tajikistan will receive a fifth of that
amount, extraordinary figures for two small and poor countries.

This decision has prompted Andrey
Ivanov, a commentator for “Svobodnaya Pressa,” to ask “against whom” are these
arms being directed and to conclude that these sales are less about conflicts
among the countries within the region than between the Russian Federation and
the United States for influence there (svpressa.ru/society/article/70075/).

But even if that is the primary
motivation, such provision of weapons systems to countries already engaged in
border skirmishes has the potential to escalate such violence among these
countries and also to implicate those supplying them with weapons in conflicts
that they may not want or even understand.

Border conflicts involving
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan and Tashkent’s recent decision to
withdraw from the Russian-led Organization of the Collective Security Treaty,
Ivanov suggests, “provide a basis for suggesting the possible rapid split of
Central Asia,” something even more likely after the withdrawal of NATO forces
from Afghanistan.

But the situation is even more
complicated, the commentator continues, because what is taking place in the
region is “the formation of blocs of states oriented toward varioius world
powers,” with the US wanting “Uzbekistan as a place des armes for the
dissemination of its influence” and Russia seeking to prevent that from
happening.

Tensions are rising between
Uzbekistan, on the one hand, and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, on the other, with
Dushanbe charging Tashkent with attacking its territory and population and
proposing to withdraw Tajiks from the frontier. At the same time, Tashkent has
indicated that it “does not exclude” the possibility of war with Tajikistan if
the latter doesn’t change its position on water flows.

Given that division of the region,
Ivanov continues, Moscow’s decision to supply arms to Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan
“looks completely logical,” although the amount of equipment seems
astronomically high given the size of the militaries of those two countries. But
of course, some of the money is payment for Kyrgyzstan’s decision to expel the
US from its base there while keeping the Russians in theirs.

Ivanov spoke with two experts about
these various moves, Valery Korovin, the director of the Moscow Center for
Geopolitical Analysis, and Dmitry Verkhoturov, an orientalist who writes
frequently on the geopolitics of Central Asia and adjoining regions of the
world.

Korovin said that the arms sales now
reflect divisions among the Central Asian countries that have arisen since the
demise of the Soviet Union. For most of the last two decades, Moscow was
“passive” and Washington succeeded in “re-orienting” many of those states
toward the West. The arms sales show that Moscow is now back and ready to play
an expanded role.

This is no easy task, he continued,
and as a result, there is “a real geopolitical battle” going on, in the first
instance in Kyrgyzstan.“We almost lost
this country,” Korovin said,” but each attempt by Moscow to recover its
influence has ended with another ‘color’ revolution.” Nonetheless, the Russian
government has to continue to try in order to keep US bases as far away from
the country’s southern borders as possible.

Working in Russia’s favor in this
regard, he suggested, is that those countries which have chosen to be allies of
the US have suffered from instability while those that have selected “Russia as
their main partner can guarantee themselves both security and relative economic
stability as well.”

Because of this, Korovin argued, “the
situation in the post-Soviet space is arranging itself in such a way that all
the former republics will return to the orbit of influence of Russia,” not by
sacrificing their sovereignty but precisely because the governments in these
countries want to maintain it.

Verkhoturov reinforced that view. He
suggested that Uzbekistan leader Islam Karimov is not interested in playing the
role of regional hegemon in the way that the United States wants and
consequently, a more general split and conflict among the countries of Central
Asia is not very likely.

And the orientalist concluded that
after the US withdraws from Afghanistan next year, Uzbekistan will be even less
interested in playing the role that Washington wants it to and that Tashkent
will once again look to Moscow to be the arbiter of water and security issues
in Central Asia.